“Place” in the Arts of Memory

Mechanisms for the Transmission of Culture: The Role of “Place” in the Arts of Memory Mary Carruthers This essay will explore the organizing theme of this conference, translatio, as liter- ally as possible, taking it to indicate those cultural materials — linguistic, auditory, tactile, visual — that are “carried-across” from one place to another. From one place to another, and also one time to another, for translatio is profoundly the task of recollection. There are various mechanisms for bringing about such cultural transporta- tion, of course — material causes like codices and rolls, jewels and fabrics and pots in particular, things that can be carried from one place to another and that also carry across time. In the Middle Ages, however, these means of translation were spotty and uncertain at best. Far more frequently than a book or a token, the favored means of cultural translation, especially in the early Middle Ages, was apt to be a living, breathing, thinking and speaking person. A living human mind could even now be considered a possible form of “material culture,” though not one that most historians are very happy to consider, let alone rely on. People die too soon, for one thing. And they have “faulty” memories. Yet, in one of the most moving acts of his reign, when Charlemagne decided to collect a great library to build up the palace school of his court in Aachen, he did so first by bringing over from England a person. 1 Alcuin in turn collected a group of scholars about him, to form the palace school and thus to create the palace library. Of course they brought books with them, but mostly they brought their learning, stored away in the treasuries of their memories. In doing so, Charlemagne, wittingly or not, was realizing an antique and early Christian trope (and reality) that one finds articulated in Jerome and in Cassiodorus, among others: that of the learned person as a living library, one who makes a mental chest of memorized texts and materials, which are 1 Charlemagne’s seeking out of Alcuin is recounted in Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, Bk. III. A good introductory account of Carolingian schools is John Contreni, “The Pursuit of Knowledge in Carolingian Europe,” in “The Gentle Voices of Teachers”: Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age, ed. R. E. Sullivan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), 106–41. 2 mary carruthers then always ready as a reference and meditation tool for him- or herself, and for the service of others. In his sixtieth Epistle, Jerome wrote to a correspondent that, “by means of care- ful reading and daily meditation, he should make himself into a library for Christ.” 2 Two centuries later Cassiodorus described a blind Greek scholar named Eusebius, who had come to the monastery at Vivarium at Cassiodorus’ invitation, presum- ably as part of his great effort to collect knowledge. This Eusebius had been blind since childhood, yet “he had hidden away in the library of his memory [in memoriae suae bibliotheca] so many authors, so many books, that he could assuredly tell others who were reading in what part of a codex they might find what he had spoken of.” 3 Another example known to Cassiodorus was the Scriptural expositor, Didymus of Alexandria, a man whose commentaries were renowned for their subtlety and com- prehensiveness, yet who had been blind from birth and thus could read only in his memory. There are also examples of scholars from the later Middle Ages, including Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Francesco Petrarca, whose reading and compositional habits make clear that the goal of making a library of one’s memory was by no means dimmed in an age when written books were far more plentiful, at least to scholars. Even at the end of the Middle Ages, as books had become increasingly plentiful and (if one can believe Geoffrey Chaucer and many others) learned people increasingly fewer, the trope of the human library persisted, translated into later medieval terms. So, in the mid-fourteenth century, the bishop of Lincoln, Richard de Bury, in his Philobiblon described how he had the manuscripts for his library collected from throughout Europe. When they are released to public view again by Bury’s teams of searchers, the dusty, cobwebbed, rat-nibbled books cry out in complaint against the scholars and keepers who have abused them. So even when amassing libraries became a matter first of collecting books rather than scholars (as had been the case in the times of Cassiodorus and of Charlemagne), the books demanded to be alive, to speak and converse, to be consumed and digested through the memories of living 2 “Lectioneque assiduo, et meditatione diuturna, pectus suum bibliothecam fecerat Christi”: Jerome, Epistulae lx.10, Patrologia latina 22: 595. 3 “Hic tantos auctores, tantos libros in memoriae suae bibliotheca condiderat, ut legentes probabiliter admoneret, in qua parte codicis quod praedixerat invenirent”: Cassiodorus, Institu- tiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), I. 5. 2. Cassiodorus mentions the example of Didymus the blind expositor in this same passage. In his Life of St. Anthony, an essential book of early monasticism, St. Athanasius remarked on Anthony’s well-stocked memory which served him instead of books: see chaps. 2–3. As a boy, St. Anthony refused to learn to read, and, according to his Life, learned his vast store of Scripture entirely by ear. The impression this story made on St. Augustine precipitated the crisis he describes in Confessiones, Book VIII. I have discussed the mental library model for the art of memory in greater detail in “Les lecteurs du moyen-âge occidental et l’art de la mémoire,” in Des Alexandries II: L’art de lire, ed. C. Jacob (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2003), 221–32. Mechanisms for the Transmission of Culture 3 people. Thus, even when confined physically to their shelves, the books moved read- ily throughout Europe through such living vehicles, “borne everywhere in the minds of their listeners”(Philobiblon, 4). 4 But how did these people do it? How was it possible for a human memory to be regarded as a primary means of cultural transmission — indeed, according to many medieval writers, a preferred means of translatio studii? The places, loci, involved in such cultural transmissions are mental, a particular kind of human space with dis- tinctive qualities. The rules for making, filing, and organizing such spaces were taught as a basic aspect of the crafting of one’s memory in the schools of antiquity and the Middle Ages, and indeed through much of the seventeenth century. The cultivation and training of memory was a basic feature of education at this time, not only because of the need to store material in memory, but more importantly because of the imperative to train and enhance the computational and inventive powers of the mind. The ancient Greek myth that made Mnemosyne, “Memory,” the mother of all the muses encapsulates this concern. In order to develop the memory into a powerful engine of invention, it was conceived of in spatial and locational terms like a kind of map, with its places and routes plainly marked. Memories were indeed, as Aristotle had said, “of the past,” but this characteristic of memories is common to all of them, as self-evident as the observation that all people breathe. To be useful in making new knowledge, particular memories must be retrievable instantly, and one at a time, one needs “random access” to them. 5 To distinguish among them, to be able find one among all the others, a uniquely markable spatial location was the key. Before I discuss some specific examples of how such systems were thought to work, however, I want to spend a little time describing how some medieval philosophers had come to conceive of the brain’s various functions. Figure 1.1 reproduces a diagram of the process of thought formation from an Anglo-Norman manuscript made in England in the later fourteenth century (Cam- bridge, University Library, MS Gg 1.1). It accompanies a brief treatise in Latin on the brain, which mentions Thomas Aquinas as its chief authority. The various activities involved in thought are drawn as “cells,” compartments linked by “channels,” as you may see here. It is important to understand that this drawing is a diagrammatic rep- resentation, not an anatomical drawing; it was drawn in order to make the functional relationships clear but the first three activities shown in the diagram as sequential were actually thought to occur almost simultaneously. The sources of the psychology 4 Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. E. C. Thomas (London: Kegan Paul, 1888); the quotations are from chapter 4. 5 Albertus Magnus, “Commentary on Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection,” trans. J. M. Ziolkowski, in M. Carruthers and J. M. Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 118–52. Albertus’ commentary should be read in conjunction with that of Thomas Aquinas on this same text of Aristotle, a translation of which is in the anthology just cited. See also M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 46–79. 4 mary carruthers Figure 1.1 Structure and activities of the human brain. Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg 1.1, f. 470v. England, late fourteenth century. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library I am about to describe are Aristotle and his medieval commentators, both in Arabic and in Latin: Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Walter Bur- ley.

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